Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie Page B

wrong. Rosemary has taken up with your colleague Mr. Turner. She’s even proposed bringing him to Posy’s place in Oxfordshire for a weekend.”
    “Really,” Vinnie says, frowning a little. Rosemary Radley, an old friend of Edwin’s, is a television and film actress. She is extremely pretty and charming; she also has a history of brief, impetuous, usually disastrous affairs. When Edwin first announced that she had “taken up with” Fred Turner, Vinnie frankly didn’t believe it. They had been seen together at a play, at a party? Very possibly they had; that didn’t mean they had come together, orwere romantically involved. Perhaps Rosemary had invited Fred to the event, because after all he is a nice-looking young man, and one whose transatlantic origin might lend a piquant variety to her usual crowd of admirers. Or perhaps she hadn’t: people always gossiped about Rosemary, often inaccurately: she’d been the heroine of so many BBC and real-life romantic serials.
    Edwin particularly enjoys fantasizing about his friends and acquaintances. He likes to hover over their adventures or presumed adventures as he does over whatever Vinnie is cooking when he comes to dinner, occasionally giving the pot a stir or adding a pinch of spices himself. “Really,” Vinnie had once said to him, “you should have been a novelist.” “Oh no,” he had replied. “Much more fun this way.”
    Even if things have gone as far as Edwin is claiming now, it can’t be very serious. Rosemary, after all, has frequent impulsive sexual lapses—referred to later with laughter in phrases like “I just don’t know what came over me” or “It must have been the champagne”—and Fred might be a relatively harmless instance of this habit. But she can hardly be serious about him. It isn’t just that she’s older, but that her world is so much more complex and resonant. If talking to Fred for any length of time rather bores Vinnie, who after all is in the same profession and department, what on earth can he have to say that would interest Rosemary Radley? On the other hand, perhaps you don’t have to interest her, as long as you are sufficiently interested in her. Perhaps what she wants is fans, not rival entertainers.
    “Of course it’s all your doing,” Edwin remarks, breaking off his loving contemplation of the menu. “If you hadn’t given that party—”
    “I never meant for Rosemary to take up with Fred.” Vinnie laughs, for surely Edwin is teasing. “I never even considered—”
    “The intentional fallacy.”
    “I never even considered it. I thought Fred ought to meet some young people, so I invited Mariana’s eldest daughter. How was I to know she’d turned into a punk rocker? She was perfectly presentable when I saw her at her mother’s last month.”
    “Well, you might have asked me,” Edwin says, breaking his current diet and liberally buttering one of the whole-wheat rolls for which Thompson’s is celebrated. Vinnie does not pick this up; if Edwin had his way, she is quite aware, he would dictate the guest lists of all her parties. His social circle is wider and considerably more glamorous than hers, and though she is perfectly happy to have him bring one or two of his well-known friends to her house—as he had brought Rosemary—she doesn’t want it to go any further. One or two celebrities are a social asset; but if you have too many, she has noticed, all they ever do is talk to one another.
    “Besides, if Mariana’s daughter’s so punk,” she asks, “why did she bother to come to a party like mine, with that awful spotty young man in black zip-up leather?”
    “To annoy her mother, of course.”
    “Oh dear. Was her mother annoyed?”
    “I think so, very,” Edwin says. “Of course she wouldn’t ever let it show, noblesse oblige .”
    “No,” Vinnie agrees, and sighs. “It’s not safe any more, is it, giving parties? One never knows what fateful events are going to be precipitated.”
    “The